New gadget: Nokia N900

I got an early Christmas present today! Robert was able to find a Nokia N900 at a very reasonable price, and Lola decided to get it for me as combined Christmas and birthday presents…

The is a fascinating device. Nokia bill it as a “mobile computer”; it has about the CPU power of a 10-15-year-old PC (say, a Pentium II), but also has a modern graphics processor, and it runs Maemo, Nokia’s rebranded version of Debian Linux. Earlier this month, Robert showed me his one running his own port of Frotz, and demonstrated that it had a full version of Linux; I saw the video of it running WebGL later on the same evening, and fell in love :-)

One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that although you can get a full Debian install running, it takes a little work and there’s no good step-by-step documentation. I’ll post about that next.